


Each to Each

by wehavefound



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Multi, Reincarnation, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:00:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27150788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wehavefound/pseuds/wehavefound
Summary: Their love knows only the animal warmth of companionship. Of a soul staring back at the past in suffering and regret until another soul takes them by the hand and leads them into a future brightened by the prospect of together. This is the way it has always been, the way it will always be. This is the dance of souls.
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4
Collections: Jalice Week 2020





	Each to Each

It is impossible to say just when their souls meet for the first time. They have always met, will always meet. In every lifetime, in every century, in every culture. There will always be a person unhappy, ashamed of their past. There will always be another delighted, looking forwards to the future. They will always love one another. This is the dance of souls, the cyclical motion that moves the world round.

The first time they fall in love they aren’t even human yet. They are Neanderthals, seeking refuge from the snow and ice in plentiful caves and living in small family groups. They meet anyway, along the coast. There are plentiful caves here, inside the high cliffs that keep them safe from the sea that seems to creep closer every day. One day the ocean will lap gently at the massive stones but for now there is a landscape suitable for hunting, the sea only a whisper at the edge of their sight. For now there are vultures to be caught, dolphins to be hunted.

He is a capable fighter, the only one to survive a disastrous mammoth hunt. He watched them die, mourned the loss of his family. He laid them to rest them alone, sought out others to join. He thinks of them often, of how his mistake caused their death. They went into the afterlife together, bodies dragged into a cave to lay by their sides as nature takes back what once was given. He fled south, fleeing the desolate cold and the hunger that came from being alone. There is no way to hunt large game when you are alone and so he barely survived to join with a family group heading to the warmer reaches below. He spends his time swimming, hunting fish and dolphins with the others here in this hub of life and enjoys the benefits that come from living in a family once more.

She is a cultural symbol, killing vultures and eagles to adorn her. She waits for them to fly down to feast on the fresh rodents she has killed, surprises them. She has a talent about it, a knack for knowing exactly what moment is best. When she has killed them she spends her day meticulously stripping the body, adorning the larger feathers with smaller trinkets harvested from songbirds until she is glorious, revered. The birds that circle above are sacred, their feathers signs of good fortune. 

She notices him first, down on the floodplains below. He has an intensity about his body that the other men do not have, some air that makes him stand out at a distance. He notices her soon after as she stands in the open face of the cliff and watches. She is adorned in all sorts of finery, feathers reaching over her small wingspan. She is on the shorter side and the vulture’s decaying wings fit her perfectly. She looks like a diety, wrapped up in her feathers, red pigment streaking her face and hands, backlit by sunlight.

They meet soon after, falling together in an easy natural way of a matching souls. They have a child together, a son who lives to be four years old. He dies during the seasonal migration of cliffs. An unseen snake. She is holding him as she passes and they lay him to rest on their journey. They pass away together, starving to death in a frozen winter. There is none who remain to bury them and so they decay in the way of animals, returning to the earth ever so slowly. The scavengers mix their bones together until in time, even those are gone.

Their souls move on.

They are early humans now, spending their entire lives traveling across the land. They are born on the journey and they live on the journey and die on the journey and all they have is a desperate hope that the place they travel too will be kinder, will have prey abundant and sturdy shelter. They love each other but this time it is the fierce love of family, of the brother beside you. 

She breaks her leg on the trip and her mother takes turns carrying her with her brother. He feels her small within his arms and knows he will do what he must to protect his sister, happy and joyful as she is. He is not much older, two years if that but she was born into famine, her small frame marred by even less food than he had. She is easy to hold. It slows the group down but they do not leave their own children behind until they go the way of the deer and rabbits they gather from the land. The fever creeps over her slowly until she cannot speak, warms his skin by her very touch. She dies beside him at the camp fire and the ashes decorate her grave site. He dies of an infection, drinking unclean water only a year later.

Their souls move on.

The earth is warming now. The skies are dark from ash and smoke that billowed forth from eruptions and the weather changes more each subsequent year. The seas creep higher and higher while the birds and rodents seem to be slowly vanishing one by one. His favorite bird of youth is rare now, its sighting a happy occasion. He sees perhaps one a year now, and no new nestlings. They are dying.

The happy one is living. He is a man in this life, finds delight in the stories and shells they trade around groups. He loves the sad one fiercely, the girl who mourns the loss of the easy days of summer that came before the eruptions. Mourns those lost in the fires that swept the land. Their love is bright and fierce. When they gaze into each others eyes it seems no disaster could be worse than the loss of each other.

They die as they lived under an ash grey sky. Everyone in their tribe perishes with them and the scavenger birds feast well for weeks. Their bones will be found one day long in the future but they will not know their story.

Their souls move on.

The earth is cold now. The ice sheets are advancing and the temperature drops daily. The Earth is not suitable for human life in these regions and yet they push forwards, small groups fighting the bitter cold in their furs and leathers. Always a struggle for survival, life becomes dependent on the small game and roots around them. They are always one moment away from embracing death instead of each other.

They are both girls this time, brushing hands as they weave baskets for gathering and insulation from the cold cave floor. They spend hours together as they work and never stray far. Neither bears children—a common occurrence these days. Food is so scarce only a few are able to conceive and so the tribe gathers round the precious few remaining children, merging with other tribes when their numbers dwindle too much.

Their people press close together for heat but the touch of the other feels different from that of the other women and they lock eyes often. They sleep hand in hand and know peace even as they starve.

Against the odds they live to the ripe old age of 45, passing down the gathering knowledge and stories they had heard as children to the next generation. They die together and the tribe sings their names as that of a married couple.

Their souls move on. 

There are dogs in this life, huge beasts that aid their hunts. They follow pointed fingers and run amok. There are farms too, small tangled affairs of plants slowly coaxed into producing more each year. They live in one place their whole lives for the first time, tending to the gardens that grow upon more of the plains with each cycle of the sickle.

The happy one is a man again, unrecognized as it was upon his birth. He attends wild boar hunts with the other men of the village. They have known each other since birth and yet it is not until the sunlight illuminates him just so in the heart of the brush that the sad one notices the happy one in the way of adults. He protects the happy one, vowing to stand by his side until death. He keeps his promise, dying when a boar breaks the cross hatch on the happy one’s spear and he pushes him to safety. The sad one cradles him in his arms as he passes away and tucks a flower into his hair, blonde for the first time in any of their lives.

Their souls move on.

They are rice farmers now, working in swamps. There are yak and water buffalo in vast pens outside their village and the milk helps them grow strong, muscles grown thick from the force of their labor. They are a man and woman once more—the happy female suitably younger to promote marital harmony as is the custom. 

They work the rice paddies together, poor peasants that they are, and soon she grows round with child. Their marriage is a fruitful one, producing two children who live to adulthood and three who do not. She is a light of sunshine as she mends their hemp clothing, sewing tigers and toads into the clothes of their children for protection. His world centers around her happy light and he does not attend the male only taverns, favoring time spent admiring her beauty, reflecting on the generosity of the spirits to allow him to find a wife who brought him so much love and joy.

She dies in childbirth along with her stillborn child and he mourns until the end of his life. Their son takes a wife into their house and thinks of them as he mends the ravages of time upon the humble home. Their daughter marries well and thinks of her parents simple peace as she combs her long hair each day.

Their souls move on.

They are llama herders now, making clothing and string from their fur and meat after their death. They are both woman again and the happy one is born into a family of herding specialists, forbidden to marry outside her caste. She falls for the silent and stone eyed priest she brings sacred llamas to for sacrifice and they share too few moments together, kept apart by their busy lives.

Every delivery is a delight and so the priest ensures she is always the one to receive the animals. They share tender moments together, brushing arms and speaking far more than is strictly necessary. The priest attends the herder’s marriage to another in her caste and weeps, although she knows not why. When her husband dies she rejoices and vows to bring her any food that can be spared, to make her life slightly easier. When the happy one dies she takes the priests heart with her and she thinks of her every sunset until her own passing.

Their souls move on.

They are born a decade apart again. The happy one is a camp woman, helping with the washing and cooking as she follows the local resistance’s doomed plight against the invaders who sweep the land. A demon fleeing the battle catches her in a group with the other domestic workers and she falls ill for three days, rising as a beast she knows not of. Her thirst is irresistible and she kills the few surviving women who tended her pain, hiding in the woods. Those she had once known seemed to be seen through new eyes and her throat burns for the blood of soldiers. 

She finds the sad one in a rebellion not a decade later, as she feasts on those around her. Her thirst has been satiated before she spies and something in his weary face speaks to her Sight, tells her he is too precious to be taken as food. She takes him a different way instead until soon enough they live as a mated pair, journeying through the land to feed on the outskirts of constant unrest.

He grows depressed over time, weary of the death that feels as though it is his own. She uses her strange second sight to find others like them, those with gifts to ease the sorrow that burdens him. He finds peace once more and contents himself with protecting the one who plucked him from certain death in a battlefield to give him new life. He’d follow her anywhere but in the end he is the one to go first, protecting her from an opposing coven. She joins him in death only a few short years later, slain by the coven who took his own life as she tried to revenge her love.

Their souls move on.

They fish now and gather acorns and other nuts. They grow up together and there is no moment they first notice each other. Their love is as natural as breathing and they marry as soon as they are both of eligible age.

The happy one delights when she has particular luck seeking out the nutritious roots from the ground. She has a knack for knowing where to dig and yet she never tires of shouting to her wife, holding the food above her head to show off her harvest. The sad one always smiles, saves any particularly good areas to happens to lead her past just to revel in her love’s pure joy.

They grow old together, living in peace in the gentle weather. The sad one is not sad, not really. She has her love and a happy environment around and all she hopes for is that the wind will never change. She passes away quietly while she sleeps one day and the happy one keeps her memory alive for eight long years until she too slips into the night, nestled on bedding that had long since lost the scent of the other but never the memories.

Their souls move on.

He is a soldier now, turned bloodthirsty once more. He fights for decades and knows not of the happy easy joy he had known in his life before. Life is tragic, horrifying. His depression returns again, the specter haunting him across centuries.

She finds him in a small diner, reaches his hand out to him. As he gazes into her eyes he knows a hope this life has never given him. He takes her hand and they fall in love ever deeper for the years they were separated. She braids his hair and comforts him with talk of the future swirling ever bright around them. He soothes her worries and believes her when she sees what he had thought impossible.

They live for a two centuries together, far longer than they ever had before. Their love matures in time but never wavers or recedes for their time spent together, for the thousands of extra sunsets they spend in each others arms. They die together, back to back, and those who loved them in life die with them.

Their souls move on.

The Climate Wars ravage the globe and there are only soldiers or refugees. The sad one begins as a refugee, pushed into shelter by the happy one. He gifts him a knife and from that moment on they are both soldiers. There are no formal drafts or trainings, not anymore, not when the droughts come. There is only a desperate need for water and those with the ability to fight for it.

The happy one finds the safest places to hide from the fires, pulls the shorter man tight against his chest until his whole world is the warm heartbeat in his chest. The sad one knows in that moment he would commit whatever atrocity he must to keep his love happy and safe. 

They die before he needs to. The bombs rain down on them only a week later and they fade slowly under a scorching sun. Bleeding out is not so quick an affair as it seems and the happy one watches the buzzards collect on his love’s lifeless body for hours before he too slips into the dark.

Their souls move on.

The happy one is a builder now, drifting into daydreams while he carefully packs the molds full of wet clay, turns them over into the fire. He thinks of what could be, of a future not so lonely until at long last he spies a hungry face in the shadows. He holds his hand out to the girl and his visions prove true.

Now as he packs bricks he thinks of his quiet lover at home, trading bricks for seeds in the market and coaxing them into a small garden that surrounds their house. In time she bears children, a daughter who survives and a son who doesn’t, and their small simple home is filled with laughter and love.

He dies from an infection in the water, his wife round with child following soon after. Their daughter is left behind to mourn their legacies until in time she leaves their house in the quiet ruins to find her own love.

Their souls move on.

They are family once more. An older brother silent and damaged, a younger brother full of life and hope. There are cities once more, humans rebuilding in the rubble and kudzu covered remains of what had stood there long ago. They live near the busy fishing market, close enough that the sound of footsteps never ceases. The silent one leaves for days at a time, on a rickety boat that he prays will deliver him home. He thinks of his sibling at home and reminds himself that one day he will be with his family again, will see the smile on his face when he brings home a rare treat of dandelion tea.

The younger one looks up to him, amazes himself with the strength he has not. He spends his time mending clothing for those well off enough to pay. There is a certain kind of bright delight in the little details of fixing, of knowing the perfect place to put a stitch and while he has no coin to waste, he meticulously collects each spare trimming until he has enough to delicate form tiny flowers he puts on twine collected from his brothers job and strings them above his bed.

The older one is lost to a rogue wave, his body given no funeral but the howling of the sea around him. His brother waits months before he accepts there will be no long last return. When he marries, he names his firstborn child for him and hopes his brother is watching from above. When he dies his portrait is added to the small collection and his child sees the two men side by side for the first time.

Their souls move on.

They walk along the sea floor now, tending to kelp growing in cyclical elevators and keeping fish in bubble pens. The ocean has free food and life for those willing to venture into indentured servitude and so they meet down below where the fish and turtles play. It’s dark down below and frightening.

Their first meeting takes place inside the dark supply station. They’ve decorated their sea gear with meticulous swirls, bioluminescent gel forming a kaleidoscope. Folks don’t waste supplier’s gear, not here, and so they must have saved up their own meager wages for weeks to paint themself. He loves them instantly.

They save him from walking out without his bubble refitters not even ten minutes after he lays eyes on them, dashing after him frantically. Most round here aren’t so friendly and he finds himself intrigued by their open friendly nature. He had never met one so genuinely happy before, not when times are so hard. They grab him by the hand and his heart melts.

They live together their whole servitude, crammed into side by side top bunks. He had to trade to be in the same dormitory but it was relatively easy, in the end. Most don’t have anyone and so the few true couples that persevere are fawned over in the depths of the sea. A little reminder of the normal life they gave up for a place to sleep and three hot meals a day. They sleep holding hands across the small gap and wake up looking into each others eyes.

They die first. A failed fence, a predator intent on their fish shoal. A tragic accident all too common. He mourns them the rest of his life and saves his rations for enough gel to paint a flower over his heart, changing the color each time it fades. When his servitude is over he finds he cannot bear to leave where they once swam with him and so he stays under the ocean until he’s forgotten what the sun looks like. He loses his mind slowly until the station manager does him a kindness, lets him slip into the void where his love once was.

Their souls move on.

He’s born wild, a son of werewolves. His childhood is marked with flights of fancy, making costumes from the scraps of his mothers old clothes, and watching for the moon carefully. He shifts for the first time at the tender age of 12, running the countryside wild with his parents by his side. He knows not what happened that night when he returns but he learns to love that side of him, how his stress seems to melt away in the face of the moon.

His parents die eventually, trapped by suspicious townsfolk and revealing their true nature on the full moon. When he awakes next he finds that he is not alone. The girl he has infected considers it a blessing. Anything to bring her out of her miserable village and into the arms of one who loves her and lifts her spirits. She loves the pack, loves the happy atmosphere it provides.

They live a long life, have many children who roam the vast wildernesses near their house and when the local town grows ever more bold in their hunts, they forgo some creature comforts to build a new house all alone in the woods, one he decorates carefully until there is an air of home to the entire affair. 

The silver bullet shoots straight and true and though it was aimed at the boy, the girl takes it for him. He dies anyway, unwilling to abandon her dying body to hide from the hunters. Their corpses lay on top of each other and the humans leave them for their children to find.

Their souls move on.

She labors on an oil rig. She has always labored on an oil rig under the scorching hot sun and the screeching of metal. She cannot read, can’t tell what the letters looming large above her say. It’s called Possibility but such things are for the ones in charge. When the newest shipment of women come in its easy to keep her head down.

One of them finds her anyway, corners her in a hallway they are not meant to be in to talk about the way things could be. She thinks her crazy but when she reaches a hand out there’s no doubt in her heart about taking it. The foreman doesn’t find them after all and something in her frozen heart solidifies into a love stronger than the metal around them.

They die in a preventable explosion, their deaths one of hundreds. She sees it coming and so when the reaper comes for them they are locked in each others embrace staring deeply into their eyes. Their deaths mean nothing and the next month there are explosions at four other rigs, each deadlier than theirs. They are written off as acceptable loses and no one suffers for their pain.

Their souls move on.

They are born in different sectors inside of humanities last hope. The heights and excesses that civilization grew to once more have begun to crumble and so a dying society flings a ship out of orbit and with it the hopes and dreams they once had for the future. He is born to a woman in seed preservation. She is born to a woman in maintenance. They are in the same education subclass and she makes faces at him over the video camera until he begs to be allowed to see her outside of the screen classes. His mother concedes and soon they spend whole days together, attending classes on the same screen.

When the time comes to carry her child he is by her side for the embryo implantation and the delivery itself. They name their child for his grandmother and think their hearts will explode from the sheer love of it all. He pulls her in for a kiss over the head of their newborn and thinks that if he lives a million years he will never be as happy as he is in this moment.

They live a long full life each and both of their allotted embryos turn out to be beautiful daughters. They die as they lived—in their quarters surrounded by happy peace on their voyage through the stars to a new home for humanity. She passes first, so peacefully it soothes his broken heart to think of the expression on her face as she looked into her own blank future. He follows a few years afterwards and their eldest carefully stitches their names into a minuscule scrap of fabric, the most that could possibly be spared.

Their souls move on.

The jagged reaches of the dishonored place are the highest unnatural structure for thousands of miles around. They are both atomic priests, sworn a sacred duty to give up home and family and personal effects to warn others of the danger foretold by the prophesies, of the glowing cats which must be avoided at any cost. 

They are the last remains of a society which had previously been able to launch thousands of people into long term space travel and they are failing in their mission. The local tribes scoff at their warnings from the days of old, insist upon traveling into the ruins despite the hundreds of warning signs pasted on each other, layer on layer.

At night when they hold each other close, the sorrowful one thinks of a little girl dead from the poison left from old times, of their failure in their inability to convince their parents of the mortal danger. The happy one reminds them always of the future, of the children they have still yet to save instead of the ones they were not fast enough for and while it doesn’t take the hurt away entirely, the feeling of their bodies together certainly does.

The radiation gets to them in the end. It’s a slow miserable death of organs shutting down one by one and bones aching from the inside out but when they lie together they can’t help but think of the good they did and the future of the nearby tribes they have protected with their sacrifice. They are deep within the fields of spikes and the buzzards that eat them live only a few months longer before the radiation takes them as well.

Their souls move on.

The colony has failed. The planet, once so promising turns to be more drier than they thought, dwindling their water supplies with each generation. There are no children left, none left with enough nutrients to even attempt to carry child. They know they are waiting for the inevitable , that humanities last hope was in vain. The new planet has seen a thousand years of struggling before the last of the resources were finally depleted and humanity could fight for a footprint in the stars no longer.

When their time comes they are cradling each other one more and gazing into each other’s eyes with a weight that spoke of the million years of history between them. The ending of a species is always a tragic and solemn affair. The sky itself seems to weep with the final ending of a possibility and so as they close their eyes for the last time and draw in a single ragged breath in unison, the sky opens up and pours down a deluge of the rain they hoped for many long years.

The crops grow better than they ever have before and five years after humanity takes its last desperate breath, the planet is an overgrown wonderland of resources without a single soul left to enjoy them.


End file.
